Last March, a reader contacted us about a free movie automatically added to his Flixster account that he didn’t even want to look at. He didn’t ask for the movie or download it on purpose, and he wanted it to go away. For some baffling reason, this was not possible. 

He wouldn’t tell us what movie it was or exactly why it offended him so, and at the time we instructed readers to just picture something that they personally find offensive or distasteful in its place. (Example: if you were the fictional character and steak aficionado Ron Swanson, imagine that it’s the pro-vegan documentary “Forks Over Knives.”)

“If you would like to give out promotional movies,” Thomas wrote to Flixster, “please 1.) make it in such a way that I can reject the movie and never see it offered again, or 2.) offer selections to choose from.”

Well, good news for Thomas. Kinda. We later heard from him that while removing films from accounts was theoretically possible, no one was actually able to remove the movie for him, or delete his account until a few weeks later, after some wrangling.

Just getting rid of a free movie that you don’t want shouldn’t take that much effort, right? Good news for him: a representative of Ultraviolet contacted us to let us know that individual sites’ limitations on streaming will no longer be a problem: Ultraviolet will let customers delete their movies directly.

“The new uvvu.com website, still in beta, provides an option in the move details page to delete an unwanted movie,” the representative told us. Neato.

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